Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism

This is a multi-disciplinary collection which reconsiders primitivism and modernism, emphasizing an earlier chronology than has been conventionally accepted and showing how ethnographic materials shaped a variety of high and low cultural discourses (ethnology, social theory, gender construction, classical scholarship, as well as travel photography) at the turn of the century. Among the topics considered are: the primitivism of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land; the discourse of Victorian sexuality; Emile Durkheim and primitive ritual observance; the manipulation of colonial photographs; the tradition of the barbarous and the noble savage in Western art, literature, and philosophy; Gaugin's images of the South Pacific; the appropriation by Europeans of non-Western bodies, images, and histories; and the relationship between modernist literary techniques and primitivism.